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‘All Involved,’ by Ryan Gattis

In recent years, riot
footage has practically become a subgenre of documentary filmmaking. We
recognize the hallmarks — advancing police phalanxes, protesters in retreat,
looters, burning cruisers, ­cameras tracking airborne projectiles — without
always understanding the causes. While the 1992 Los Angeles riots lacked the
exhaustive citizen reportage of more recent incidents, there was enough
videotape running back then to give the rest of the country the lasting
impression of a restless city entirely engulfed in chaos. In his latest novel,
“All Involved,” Ryan Gattis imagines a narrative that, while mostly tangential
to that chaos, attempts to give it more meaningful context through
personalization.

Gattis’s premise is
provocative: In the six days following the verdict of April 29, 1992, that
acquitted three white police officers of using excessive force on Rodney King,
the Los Angeles Police Department was so focused on the most violent
manifestations of civil unrest that much of the rest of the city went
unregulated. “All Involved” consists of 17 different perspectives, a majority
of which issue from characters who have all been involved in some manner of
illegal activity. As their neighborhood, Lynwood, plunges into general
lawlessness because the police are struggling elsewhere, the path becomes clear
for these individuals to go extra rogue, settling scores that mostly revolve
around revenge and betrayal.

Ripples of violence — in
gruesome detail — radiate from the murder of Ernesto Vero, a law-abiding
citizen whose ­brother and sister happen to have ties to Lynwood’s most
notorious gangster clique. What starts out as a mini-mystery — who killed
Ernie? — quickly sprawls into a weblike tale of logistics and gangland tactics:
How do we get guns and access to the guys who took out Ernie? How do we keep
the families of the guys who got Ernie from coming back at us? A great many
favors, lies, beatdowns and bullets are exchanged against a backdrop of raging
fires, property damage and widespread paranoia.

Unfortunately, “All
Involved” often feels a bit too rigidly orchestrated alongside such disorder.
Gattis has chosen a ­difficult challenge in creating so many separate
narrators, never revisiting a particular point of view after that person’s tale
is told. Switching tone and dialect can do only so much — especially when Lil
Creeper, Lil Mosco, Big Fate and Lupe Payasa Vera all hail from relatively
similar backgrounds. Mostly, Gattis distinguishes his characters by allowing
them to ramble and reflect at length about their respective histories, dreams
and circumstances. But these extensive and occasionally meandering inner
monologues seem out of place, if not de-escalating, in moments of real peril
and tension.

And while Gattis writes in
a breezy, frictionless style, he winds his Lynwood microcosm too tightly.
Characters cross paths when they needn’t. Story lines intersect in contrived
ways. In one of the novel’s more exhilarating sequences, a young graffiti
artist sets off to skip town on the fifth day of the riots, stopping only to
memorialize Ernesto in spray paint on a city bus. The sequence sings, in part
because Gattis is himself a street artist and revels in the language and art of
vandalism. It also feels like a reprieve to a dozen different takes on the same
tragic story. But when the tagger sells his last gun to a junior criminal who
just happens to have been present at Ernesto’s murder and who, brandishing the
newly acquired weapon, returns to Ernesto’s home to join up with the gang
seeking vengeance, it strips the moment of its simple, random, undogmatic
beauty. By now we’ve seen enough rocks, bottles and threats hurtled to not
always need to be told where they come from.

ALL INVOLVED

By Ryan
Gattis

372 pp.
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

Neil Drumming is a writer and filmmaker whose feature debut was “Big
Words.”

A fly by imagination

And life passes so quickly...

Because literature is part of our history.

The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination.I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.